In a way then, techno-pessimism in education is self-fulfilling. We can follow a cautious, sceptical approach and wait for strong research results that conclude that certain Virtual Reality applications lead to better learning results. But by doing so, we give the entertainment industry a head start, making it very hard for education to catch up. I guess something similar happened with our smartphones. We don’t primarily use these devices for their powerful learning capabilities, but instead for posting selfies on Instagram.

As the geography of AirSpace spreads, so does a certain sameness. Schwarzmann’s cafe phenomenon recalls what the architect Rem Koolhaas noticed in his prophetic essay "The Generic City," from the 1995 book S,M,L,XL: "Is the contemporary city like the contemporary airport—‘all the same’?" he asks. "What if this seemingly accidental—and usually regretted—homogenization were an intentional process, a consscious movement away from difference toward similarity?"

Yet AirSpace is now less theory than reality. The interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports, qualities that led the French anthropologist Marc Augé to define them in 1992 as "non-places," has leaked into the rest of life.

As an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another, as Schwarzmann discovered

This is true for researchers who have long critiqued corporate power, and it’s true for conservative pundits who love using this frame to shore up their hatred for mainstream media. So now there are dozens of meetings being held on “fake news” as folks wring their hands to find a solution; meanwhile, pundits and advocates of all stripes are calling on companies to fix the problem without even trying to define the problem. We’re seeing some folks focusing intently on “accuracy” and “truth,” while others are more focused on how content produces cultural frames.

BeerBergman's insight:

danah boyd on how framing and insinuating are more powerful and more difficult to master than outright "fake news" stories.

The impossibility of mastering 'fake news' is related to the fact that 'fake news' is a complex whole of message, sender, receiver and environments (and relationships between all of these).

It is basically a social problem because 'fake news' is the enactment by people who are embedded in social structures, of which the online reflection is perhaps no more than the word says : reflection. A sign of all times. And it is extremely difficult to treat a sign, or a reflection, without addressing this complex whole and without changing profoundly the actors relationship with his/her environment and with the information itself.

Our understanding of media power (and of what it means to call something propaganda) must make room for a variety of potential collective and individual influences. This includes corporations, interest groups, activist groups, and other traditional collectives; it should also include the new forms of individual and collective presence that digital communications facilitate. This includes state-sponsored online actors and ad-hoc user collectives.

The political strategy behind ride-sharing lies in pitting the figure of the consumer against the figure of the citizen. As the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has argued, the explosion of consumer choices in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t only affect the kinds of products people owned. It affected the way those people regarded government services and public utilities, which began to seem shabby compared with the vibrant world of consumer goods. A public service like mass transit came to seem less like a community necessity and more like one choice among many. Dissatisfied with goods formerly subject to collective provision, such as buses, the affluent ceased to pay for them, supporting private options even when public ones remained. The promise of ride-sharing is that it complements public transit. In practice, ride-sharing eliminates public transit where it exists.

EARLIER this year Françoise Hardy, a French musician, appeared in a YouTube video (see link). She is asked, by a presenter off-screen, why President Donald Trump sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to lie about the size of the inauguration crowd. First, Ms Hardy argues. Then she says Mr Spicer “gave alternative facts to that”. It’s all a little odd, not least because Françoise Hardy (pictured), who is now 73, looks only 20, and the voice coming out of her mouth belongs to Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Mr Trump.

As of now, Amazon absorbs all the costs for the last-mile activities described above. But if you have a bunch of well-lit, large distribution nodes in excellent locations with lots of parking, or that are bypassed by lots of foot traffic, and if you can encourage some of your customers to pick up and drop off from those places, then the customers are picking up a large share of those costs.

Amazon isn’t just buying a bourgie grocery chain, in other words. It’s also acquiring the labor of its customers to get its goods where they need to go.

BeerBergman's insight:

Framing, framing. Do all shops not do the same ? Make you do the work to pick up the goods? In other words, the essence of a shop is... well, sell and make the stuff being picked up by the client. In former "small shops" days, we would even claim this was a social act, meeting with the community.

A slowly developing public sphere, where public opinion relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the environmental view of Internet freedom. As opposed to the self-aggrandizing view that the West holds the source code for democracy -- and if it were only made accessible, the remaining autocratic states would crumble -- the environmental view assumes that little political change happens without the dissemination and adoption of ideas and opinions in the public sphere. Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation. Moreover, a public sphere is more likely to emerge in a society as a result of people's dissatisfaction with matters of economics or day-to-day governance than from their embrace of abstract political ideals.

Now we have programs that can process data and even give predictions, on a far bigger scale than humans can. In the narrow fields that they are programmed in, these machines are the best. This is in contrast to humans, who are generally mediocre or good at a lot of things—generalists and specialists, in other words.

In fact, these machines have their own unique neural architectures, distinct from the human kind. Adapting how the brain thinks is hard for just these narrow competencies, so completely new ways of “learning” had to be developed.

Ultimately, all of these will have to be considered both in developing AI and in a society built around it. We need to consider other kinds of neural architectures and ways of thinking in order to better develop machine learning.

But more importantly, we’ll need to start talking about how we are going to treat these machines. Are they simple tools engineered for a task? Or are they intelligent beings capable of thinking just like human beings?

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